Commons:Categories for discussion/2018/08/Category:Substring

See also: Commons:Categories for discussion/2018/12/Category:Computer science suffixes.

Overcategorization. We already have Category:String (computer science) and even that's a tenuous need. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:17, 30 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Also Category:String data structures and Category:Substring indices Just how many new string-related categories do we need?! Especially when they're all most red-categorized and have no media content other than more layers of indirect string-related categorization. Andy Dingley (talk) 12:44, 30 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the usefulness of many of these categories appears to be questionable. In particular,

• I would suggest to delete
  • Category:String data structures (3C),
  • Category:Generalized suffix tree (1F),
  • Category:Substring indices (2C),
  • Category:Conditional constructs (2F, 1C),
  • Category:Computer science suffixes (2C), and
  • Category:Substring (1F);
• I am not quite sure about
  • Category:String (computer science) (4C) and
  • Category:Combinatorics on words (2C); and
• I expect
  • Category:Suffix tree (9F, created by myself), and
  • one of Category:Pattern matching programming languages (1C) or Category:Pattern matching (2C, 1F), but not both,

to be useful.

Apart from the noted exception, all these categories were created by Allforrous‎; most of them recently. I noted the contents statistics in parantheses after each category name; for the "unsure" and "useful" categories, I expect they can be inhabited by some manual keyword searches on commons.

@Allforrous: I know it can be tempting to create a new category for every notion that comes to one's mind. However, in order to keep the category tree to a reasonable depth, we have to be parsimonious with that. I think, a category should not be created if there aren't sufficiently many files present that go there. Long chains of almost empty subcategories don't help to navigate through the tree. - Jochen Burghardt (talk) 16:24, 30 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Stale discussion. @Jochen Burghardt and Andy Dingley: in the meantime, nominated categories have grown. All these five categories (nominated to be deleted) has equivalent article in enwiki (eg en:Generalized suffix tree). Still to be deleted or kept, other ideas?--Estopedist1 (talk) 21:52, 5 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Here is the actual statistics for the above categories:

• Category:String data structures (10C, 1F)
• Category:Generalized suffix tree (1F)
• Category:Substring indices (4C)
• Category:Conditional constructs (3C, 1F)
• Category:Computer science suffixes (4C)
• Category:Substring (1C, 1F)
• Category:String (computer science) (5C, 27F)
• Category:Combinatorics on words (6C)
• Category:Suffix tree (1C, 36F)
• Category:Pattern matching programming languages (2C)
• Category:Pattern matching (6C, 1F)

I still suggest to:

• delete Category:Substring - hasn't grown in 3 years; can hardly been illustrated different from the 1 image (by analogy, we don't have a Category:Less than for numbers)
• dissolve Category:Generalized suffix tree into Category:Suffix tree - hasn't grown in 3 years; can be recreated lateron if there are sufficiently many images for it
• delete Category:Computer science suffixes - seems to me an arbitrary criterion (by analogy: Category:Surnames ending in a vowel), its members don't have anything important in common
• dissolve Category:String (computer science) into Category:String data structures - almost all images in the former (were uploaded by me and) concern cons-nil-lists, which also fit into the latter category

Jochen Burghardt (talk) 12:29, 6 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]